Meetings category

The Unleash Kids Campaign, the volunteer-run project developing learning kits around the XO-4 Touch laptop, will host Rabi Karmacharya, Executive Director of OLE Nepal, live from Kathmandu. I’ll be producing the Google+ Hangout On Air show from my office in Washington, D.C. Christoph Derndorfer in Vienna, Austria will be interviewing our guest.

The Hangout will be archived as it unfolds and will be available on the Unleash Kids YouTube channel after the session concludes.

OLE Nepal (Open Learning Exchange Nepal) is a social benefit organization dedicated to enhancing teaching-learning in schools through the integration of technology and to provide uniform access to quality educational materials across different geographic areas and socio-economic strata.

Bio: Rabi Karmacharya co-founded OLE Nepal in 2007 to implement OLPC program in partnership with Nepal Government. Since then OLE Nepal has completed two years of pilot, and the program is currently running in 27 schools scattered in seven districts in Nepal. OLE Nepal has also been developing local education content designed by curriculum experts that are loaded on the XOs and updated periodically through the school server. Teachers receive training on using the laptops and the content to teach subjects such as English, Nepali and mathematics. Currently heading a team of 27 staff comprising of educators, curriculum experts, content coordinators, software developers, graphic designers, network engineers, system administrators, and volunteers. Born and raised in Kathmandu. Received MEng and BSc in Electrical Engineering from MIT.

What: Scratch Day DC 2013 for Everyone!When: Saturday, May 18, 2013, 10 am to 5pmWhere: Gallaudet University [map,aerial photo], Student Academic Center in computer labs SAC 1010 and SAC 1212, Washington, D.C. 20002
Lunch is on your own. The SAC cafeteria kitchen is closed, but you can bring lunch to eat in the dining area. Off campus, try Union Market nearby or this map.

You will have a chance to try out the free MIT Scratch software which enables kids of all ages to author multimedia stories and interactive games by snapping together visual programming blocks. The software runs on Linux, Mac and Windows. Scratch also connects to sensors in the physical world using the PicoBoard USB accessory from SparkFun Electronics. We will have one of those on display and two of them will be raffled off!

Kevin Cole has his labs set up to run Scratch 1.4 and the new web-based Scratch 2.0. Bring a USB drive if you want to save your project, or we can help you set up an account on the MIT Scratch web site where you can upload and save your projects. If you have your own projects, bring them on a USB drive or laptop to show off!

First, Open International founder Khady Lusby, will talk about College Adja Penda Ba in Nioro, Senegal and their new program for children using Sugar and XO computers. Our meeting host, Jeff Elkner, of Sugar Labs DC, is supporting her deployment (see blog post) of HP and OLPC XO laptops and will help provide training to students who will visit the school as part of their senior experience. Brittany Windju of Yorktown High School is refurbishing laptops and maintaining a detailed project blog.

Following Khady, I will do a trip report on my USAID/Worldvision-funded workshop sessions for the Lubuto Library Project in Lusaka, Zambia, which ran last month from February 18 – 27. My time followed Christoph Derndorfer’s week there in late January repairing and refurbishing the 20+ XO laptops in use in two childrens’ libraries. My sessions, held at the newer library at Ngwerere Basic School in the Garden Compound, focused on training Lubuto staff and students basic and advanced Squeak Etoys and sound editing skills to enable them to enhance the 700 digital language literacy lessons they developed in 2011. For a peek at my odyssey, see this photo set on Flickr (and my detour to the incredible Victoria Falls!).

Lastly, we’ll have a beta version of the OLPC XO-4 Touch laptop, which goes into mass production soon, for you to try out.

On Saturday, Nov. 17 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Sunday, Nov. 18 from 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., the Adaptive Services Division of the DC Public Library will host a DIY (Do It Yourself) Fair in the Great Hall of Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library at 901 G St. NW. The DIY Fair will be a celebration of creativity for people with and without disabilities.

The Learning Club meeting will take place Saturday Nov. 17 at 10am on the second floor of the east lobby of the DC Library during the Fair. I will give an update using the presentations I gave at the OLPC Summit on OLPC open hardware and Lubuto Library in Zambia, show off the new OLPC 15 watt solar panel with an XO-1.75 laptop, talk about the USAID grant and relay some significant news on the future of OLPC (much positive, some uncertain). I will have USB drives with the latest stable build of the XO-1 operating system for anyone who needs to upgrade their laptop. The upgrade will overwrite the contents of your laptop, so be sure to copy off important files. If you have any other special needs, please contact me in advance.

This will be the last Learning Club meeting for 2012, so please use the meeting opportunity and display hours next weekend at the DC Library to bring your questions about OLPC, open source learning, open source hardware and informal digital learning.

We’ve gotten RSVPs from friends old and new for this Saturday’s MIT Scratch Day in Arlington, VA. It’s going to be a fun event locally that’s part of an epic global day of celebration that will see our superhero orange cat dancing across thousands of computer screens. All of our event information is the same as previously announced, but here’s a recap and some new goodies:

And there are several interesting and related developments occurring this week:

MIT Media Lab Conversations Series Hosts Sugata Mitra – Wednesday May 16th 4:30-6:00pm (tomorrow!) Professor Sugata Mitra, champion of the concept of “minimally invasive education” (MIE), will discuss the question “Is Education Obsolete?” Mitra has most recently been collaborating with Nicholas Negroponte to test a deployment of 20 Android tablets in a remote village in Ethiopia. The talk will be webcast live and archived here: http://j.mp/JJ6fQr

5-day Preview of Scratch 2.0 – The Scratch team at the MIT Media Lab has been hard at work developing the next generation of Scratch, which will be completely web-based, requiring no installation of software. To commemorate Scratch Day and the 5th anniversary of the software, the team will open up the alpha version of the new site starting this Thursday May 17 through Monday May 21. The site is currently password protected, but check this link soon: http://alpha.scratch.mit.edu/ Here’s a preview video: http://vimeo.com/41683547

Get Your MaKey MaKey! – Two graduating members of the Scratch team, Eric Rosenbaum and Jay Silver, have revealed a new project on Kickstarter called MaKey MaKey. It’s an amazing little $35 circuit board that turns almost any real-word object into a computer keyboard or piano key input. It requires no assembly or additional software other than what you have already to create a piano out of bananas or a game controller made of Playdoh or buckets of water to name a few of the infinite possibilities. The project was fully funded last night after launching early on Monday. Hurry over to the site to learn more and place an order: http://makeymakey.com/

O’Reilly Books 50% Off 18 E-books This Weekend – It turns out this weekend is also when Maker Faire will be held in San Mateo, California. To celebrate, O’Reilly is discounting by 50% selected DRM-free ebooks on the topics of robots, sensors and science. Visit this link: http://j.mp/Klh5ys

Well thanks for sticking with this long message. I hope there’s something for everyone whether you can attend Scratch Day or not. See you soon!

We are back at Gallaudet University this Saturday to discuss the recent announcements from OLPC on the XO 3.0 tablet and XO-1.75 laptop. Jeff Elkner will also demo Sugar running on Trisquel GNU/Linux 5.0. We will do some planning on our agenda for the May 19th, 2012 Scratch Day event.

As some of you know, we decided to take the summer off. Normally we would have had a meeting in September, but I elected to attend Mobile UX Camp in DC. Then the next day, my family and I did a day trip to Maker Faire in Queens, NY. OLPC had a booth there.

I’ll be fresh from two days of sponsor meetings at the MIT Media Lab earlier in the week, so I’m sure I’ll have some interesting news. This is the first event to be hosted by Joi Ito, the lab’s new director.

Our third annual Scratch Day will arrive this Saturday afternoon at the Arlington Career Center in Virginia. We’re reprising last year’s winning formula this year to run three concurrent hands-on workshops for teachers, parents and kids. The latest version of Scratch, the MIT Media Lab’s fabulous interactive authoring software, is installed in each of the computer labs. We also expect to be able to demonstrate Scratch 1.4 running on the OLPC XO-1 laptop with support for the built-in camera and the Journal file system.

Our special guest Michael Badger, author of Scratch 1.4: Beginner’s Guide, has graciously offered to return this year. Michael will help lead one of the workshops. His publisher, Packt Publishing, has generously sponsored our event again with copies of the book to raffle and book discount flyers. And we have a special raffle prize related to robotics!

With speakingengagements and family travel for the rest of the Saturdays this month, I’ve decided not to have a formal user group meeting. Spring fever too! If anyone wants to have an informal meeting on a weeknight, I’m available the evening of Thursday, April 28th for a meet-up somewhere downtown. Wayan is pretty busy the rest of this month and then out of the country next, so we won’t be at the Looking Glass Lounge.

We will be meeting again next month on the afternoon of May 21 with the big bang of Scratch Day 2011 at the Arlington Career Center. There will be one or more blog posts and an email update coming before the event. We’re looking for volunteers to present workshops or projects as well as assist with setting up. Please contact Jeff Elkner jeff at elkner.net or Mike Lee curiouslee at gmail.com.